Researchers find a new way to link fracking to earthquakes in Texas - Entrepreneur Generations

Science Advances graphic; click on the image to enlarge it.

Hydraulic fracturing may be responsible for an increasing number of earthquakes in Texas, according a study published Nov. 24 in Science Advances.

Previous studies have suggested a correlation between fracking and earthquakes, but it's almost impossible to directly prove the cause of an earthquake by looking at its characteristics or plotting quakes on a map. "A cluster of earthquakes around a drilling project can, at best, suggest a relationship," Ben Guarino reports for The Washington Post.

So researchers from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the U.S. Geological Survey took a different tack: they performed a sort of ultrasound (called seismic reflection imaging) on the earth below Texas to see if there were active faults that could be causing the recent spate of earthquakes. They compared their readings with figures from the Mississippi Embayment, a region with similar seismic activity and geologic placement but far less fracking. They found that the Mississippi Embayment's earthquakes were caused by continuous fault activity for the past 65 million years, but faults in the area of Texas they studied haven't been active for 300 million years, so there is no known geologic process that could explain them.

Cliff Frohlich, a geophysicist at the University of Texas in Austin who was not involved in the study, told Guarino that the study provides a powerful argument at "these earthquakes are something new and different."

Fracking has been linked to earthquakes before; Oklahoma lawmakers released guidelines in 2016 to force drilling companies to pause and evaluate the effects of their operations when an earthquake of sufficient strength occurs.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2jrfAnY Researchers find a new way to link fracking to earthquakes in Texas - Entrepreneur Generations

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